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For an international financial institution reputedly in decline and less than beloved by a global development community that increasingly rejects its traditional top-down model for aid, the World Bank and its soon-to-be-vacant chief executive's chair sure are attracting a lot of speculation - and one very public campaigner for the post.

Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs - he of the Millennium Development Goals and omnipresence in the discussion of world development issues - has thrown his hat in the ring for the job that Robert Zoellick will vacate on July 1. Backed by the likes of Bill Gates and Bono, and supported by many in the Twitter brigade, Sachs is campaigning openly for the gig, promising in a Washington Postop-ed piece kicking off his candidacy "to side with the poor and hungry, not with a corporate balance sheet or a government."

While other A-list American names making the Washington tout sheets ahead of President Obama's nomination include the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, there is also a rising chorus of voices calling on Obama to nominate a non-American for the first time since the World Bank was established in 1944 to aid development and reconstruction after the Second World War. Indeed, the debate over the position includes what has become the usual push and pull of first world versus third world, Global North versus Global South. And in Sachs' bold campaign for the job, he pushes for World Bank leadership predicated on an understanding of development and poverty and issues of the human condition rather than high finance.

But in all of the speculation over who will become the 12th president of the World Bank, one key aspect of the Bank's operation and value - indeed, the very mark of Zoellick's nearly-concluded tenure - is conspicuously missing from the debate.

Data.

Specifically big data - the vast trove of statistics on world development and trends that the World Bank assiduously collects with its staff of more than 10,000 analysts, researchers, and economists. And thanks to a recent shift on World Bank policy, that data is now more freely available than ever before.

In many ways, the story of the World Bank in the four years after former Bush Administration hawk Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign in scandal is the story of how a huge, once-closed bureaucracy took an important turn in the road toward sharing information more openly in the digital age. And while that story is still being written, it's vital to push the Bank's commitment to open data to the center of the table and ask that all candidates for Zoellick's (public and the back channel operators both) consider its important not just to the World Bank, but to the changing infrastructure of international development.

That's because in today's world, data matters - and public data matters more. A team of economists sifting public health numbers to get a handle on potential epidemic outbreaks and their cost in south Asia is valuable; a network of outside experts and semi-professionals mulling the same data increases the chances of accurate analysis - and lays the groundwork in public for the right political and policy response.